Moleskine

Facilitating Creative Networking

Project type: Mobile and Desktop Design (Concept)

Duration: 3 weeks (Group)

Role: UX/UI Designer, Researcher

Moleskine, known for its iconic notebooks, blends analog and digital with the Smart Writing set, enabling users to digitize and share notes. We designed a social networking experience that allows users to showcase work, collaborate, and share ideas within a connected community. This unified experience preserves Moleskine’s timeless appeal while embracing innovation.

Collaborated on research, ideation, UX writing, wireframing, and prototyping. Responsible for visual design, facilitation, user modeling, service design blueprint creation, sitemapping, and building the component library.

Mobile Walkthrough

Desktop Walkthrough

The Impact

Fostering relationships between creatives and providing opportunities for collaboration

Methods and Deliverables

Facilitation | Business and Product Analysis | Competitor Analysis | Combined User Interviews and Usability Tests | Affinity Maps | Testing Teardowns | User Modeling | Sketches | Service Design Blueprint | User Flow | Sitemap | Mid-Fidelity Mobile Prototype | Content Strategy | UX Writing | Style Guide | High-Fidelity Mobile and Desktop Prototypes | Component Library

Tools

WebAim | Zoom | Dovetail | Figma | Figjam | Pen and Paper

Outcomes

  • Interviews revealed that many creatives want to build small communities of trustworthy peers within their field for collaboration, learning, and networking, but struggle to form these connections.

    To address this, our solution features a comprehensive onboarding questionnaire that asks users to specify their interests, such as skills they wish to learn or projects they want to undertake. Based on their responses, users receive a personalized list of recommended connections, events, communities, projects, and educational resources. Specific suggestions can be additionally generated through an AI Search feature.

    Credibility is established through public portfolios (in which users are encouraged to demonstrate their creative process through notes, demos, and rough sketches), participation in larger groups, and a referral system.

  • In addition to networking, users can collaborate on projects directly in the desktop app.

    By streamlining and centralizing the networking to collaboration to production pipeline, our design increases efficiency and organization, allowing users to focus on creating. This is especially true for owners of the Smart Writing Set who do not have to spend time transcribing or uploading their musings.

  • We decided to build a separate app from the existing Smart Writing set Notes app in order to entice users who do not own the Smart Writing Set and widen the potential user base. The new app establishes brand trust by offering a great collaboration and networking platform, and then advertises the Smart Writing Set to users, highlighting how it can enhance their app experience.